Soul Searching in Scorched Ruins

BRITAIN

The Brixton riots stir a wave of anguish and recrimination

As policemen and housewives sifted through the scorched rubble in the South London neighborhood of Brixton last week, some oldtimers were reminded of the damage caused by the blitz in World War II. This time the damage was self-inflicted. For three nights, the crowded, hardscrabble neighborhood of 62,000 had been torn by the worst interracial rioting the country had ever experienced. Gangs of predominantly black West Indian youths hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at hundreds of riot police. Waves of other youngsters took part in an orgy of burning and looting By the time a tense calm finally returned to Brixton, the toll of violence was stark: 149 police injured, one of whom remained unconscious days later; 58 civilians hurt; 120 buildings damaged, including nine that were completely destroyed; 47 stores looted; 224 people arrested. The total property damage was estimated to be as high as $4.4 million.

Britain as a whole was swept up in a wave of shock and recrimination. In the House of Commons, Home Secretary William Whitelaw reported on a personal visit to Brixton, conducted during a lull in the rioting, and announced that a respected and nonpartisan peer, former Jurist Lord Scarman, would investigate the causes of the violence. Firebrand M.P. Enoch Powell, a Tory turned Ulster Unionist and a longtime opponent of nonwhite immigration to Britain, warned that "you have seen nothing yet." Five M.P.s demanded "a vigorous policy" of subsidized repatriation of nonwhite immigrants. The ruckus spread as far away as New Delhi, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, on an official visit to India, was confronted by demonstrators protesting Britain's new immigration restrictions. A group of 23 pickets was arrested after throwing placards at her limousine.

What caused the riots? What could be done to prevent a recurrence? What did it all say about the kind of multiracial society that Britain has become after absorbing 1.9 million nonwhite immigrants since the 1950s? A similar social explosion occurred a year ago in the seaport city of Bristol, where a police drug raid on a cafe provoked both blacks and whites to take to the streets. Twenty-one policemen and nine civilians were injured in clashes, but property damage was far less extensive than in Brixton. To many analysts, unemployment and poor housing were the common denominators in both cases. A key difference, however, is that Brixton is now known as London's Harlem. Since the '50s it has been a traditional settlement area for West Indian immigrants, because it is close to the center of London and also offers cheap and plentiful housing. About one-third of Brixton's residents are black, and in some areas the concentration reaches 70%. Among young blacks in Brixton, the unemployment rate is 67%, compared with a 27% rate among Brixton youths in general.

A more immediate cause of the riots, according to many Brixtonians, was the provocative behavior of the overwhelmingly white British police force (only 286 blacks and Asians belong to the 117,000-member police force in England and Wales). In the past two years Brixton had been targeted by the London police as a high-crime area deserving of special attention. An average of 90 burglaries, muggings and assaults occurred there each week.